(no subject)

[aslant]

my grandfather's one remaining brother committed suicide over the weekend. pistol or pills, the details are unclear. he was recently discharged from a nursing home and not entirely coherent but very determined to die. my mother implied in her email that his immediate family knew he was planning it. he requested no service / no memorial.

i feel shitty because now my grandfather has retreated up to his cabin in maine and he has been calling me for weeks & i haven't responded - i am lazy and do not want to go to connecticut for a weekend to help with his book project and no i have not typed up any of his chapters yet - and now because of a suicide i will call him.

.

Comments

[ex-mthrtong.livejournal.com]

oh. you know, my grandmother, my father's mother...when she died--not a suicide--i felt myself in a similar situation. i'd never known her well, she'd been pretty lost with alzheimer's since i was a child. for over a decade, she'd been restricted to a hospital bed, not speaking, feeding tube, etc., so when she finally died....well, i felt relieved for her. i have no way of knowing, of course, but my sense was that it was what she wanted. and yet, it all triggered a similar situation w/ my father, where he'd been calling for weeks wanting me to visit, and i had no time and had reasons not to go there, but a phone message from him, saying my g'ma had died, was too much, and i knew i had to go, and i felt like a bad person, and i felt overwhelmed, and i even felt a little resentful...anyway.

love, sorry. take care of yourself.

Re:

[aslant.livejournal.com]

thank you for your thoughts - it is too terrible the way deaths throw other, seemingly unrelated things into turmoil, and there's no way to extricate any one reaction or interaction from the rest.

part of me is so glad there won't be a funeral, because it would be a giant emotional cesspool of family weirdnesses.

but anyway. thank you.

[souvenant.livejournal.com]

Re:

[aslant.livejournal.com]

love you, too.
not much to say, i guess.
i'm not entirely sad. (he was
obviously looking for a way
out; he checked in & out of
hospitals over the last few
months WITHOUT telling any
family where he was, triggering
police searches etc etc etc.)

i guess it's more of a shock to find out about it so abruptly, and through email, and it's such a bizarre state of affairs. also, my mother found out amidst funeral news that a childhood friend of hers was actually a cousin - conceived out of wedlock between uncle bob (the one who died) and a friend of my mom's mother. apparently my uncles used to flirt with said cousin all the time, no one ever knew they were all related. my mother finds this hi-larious. hah. it makes me a tad queasy in a surreal, quasi-hillbilly-soap-opera kind of a way.

bah. crazy world, crazy family. rest in peace, bob.